Y'know, as easy and fun as it is to mock the Herald's front page "news" such as what Sonny Bill Williams got up to this week, this is the sort of stuff that's truly disturbing. Their celebrity-led stories are driven by profit; this sort of story is driven by agenda. It's a disservice to their 1.74m readers.

It should be a news story, but the fundamental trouble here is that the decision to defund public service broadcasting doesn't hinge on the data -- the actual real figures are irrelevant to the Minister's position, which is ideological rather than utilitarian.

So I predict the attitude will be "pfft, what matters a few hundred thou?"

This brings to mind a spat I had on the phone around 7-8 years ago with Fran O'Sullivan because of a graph she had used for a story on the FRONT PAGE of the Herald. It was a classic example of inaccurate labelling of axes, no margin of error, etc. etc. - just abysmal. I wrote her a scathing e-mail about it and she actually rang me up to tell me off! Her answer, distilled down, was, "It doesn't matter because it is obvious what the graph is saying." Which set me off on another storming rant about accuracy of graphs and stats, and how it's easy to make it say what you want it to say if you manipulate the presentation. In the end, she hung up on me with the parting shot, "You're just being pedantic." Ahhh . . . yes!

It should be a news story, but the fundamental trouble here is that the decision to defund public service broadcasting doesn’t hinge on the data – the actual real figures are irrelevant to the Minister’s position, which is ideological rather than utilitarian.

It's also worth noting that audience size wasn't a deliverable in the original agreement between TVNZ and the government. TVNZ 6 and 7 weren't expected to rate like commercial channels. In that light, a million and a half viewers a month is really pretty good.

Anybody fancy having a NZ version of Fullfact? A bunch of students would be great! Maybe analysing the drug driving stuff ("hey, we fought for this legislation and funding, we'd better use it or we'll look stoopid") would be an interesting start.

Even from here, it's a daily vindication of my decision years ago to stop reading papers / watching TV. NZ is a bit better, but not that much.

The only problem is I now spend my life puzzled by how people have such skewed worldviews :)

In the end, she hung up on me with the parting shot, “You’re just being pedantic.” Ahhh . . . yes!

This is such a common response from senior journalists.

If I’m chatting at a BBQ with a glass of wine with my friends I don’t need to be precise about my numbers.

If I’m arguing with my father (who’s dead) I can just outright lie, he certainly will.

But if I’m publishing my work, my numbers better be right, at that point someone else is relying on me being right. Hell I’m paid to be right or if I’m not certain, to be precise about my language and define exactly how uncertain I am (that’s statistics).

If a journalist says they don’t need to be pedantic then aren’t they also saying they don’t need to be paid any more? Because at that point they are not doing their job.

I'm sure <grin> Graeme Edgler will correct me if I misquote him, but he makes the point that, while he knows NZ First got 4.07% of the party vote in 2008, he stills checks the figure every time before he writes it.

publish AND be damned...I would have thought that a Minister and a paper using the wrong figures to vindicate, or support, a decision to close a public resource, would fall under the description of fraud - or at least a scam, using a document for gain...

Down for the count......and how much longer can The New Zealand Herald keep that name, I'm sure I read somewhere recently (can't find it again rapidly though, dammit) that The NZ Herald is no longer physically distributed to the South Island, as it costs more than they get back - hello the North Island Messenger, or Auckland Crier perhaps...

If the usual suspects are going to nail their colours to a mast, I’d very much appreciate it if they were a lot more fucking honest about it. This whole affair deserves nothing less than the full force of the Press Council. Or even the law. It shouldn’t have to take a Hackgate for it all to come unstuck.

BTW I’m not even sure it’s Currie writing the anti-TVNZ7 editorials, but someone even more economical with the truth. And we know who that guy is.

And a bloody weird and defensive one in this instance, since I rather doubt O’Sullivan gets “final cut” (as it were) on the graphics, photos and headlines attached to her stories. You’d think senior journalists would care a little more because, however unfairly, it’s their reputations affected. (Around PA I get to write my own heads and slug lines, so any epic taste fails are all on me. Bugger.)

Fran O, like Karl du Fresne and Deborah Coddington, seems to have an inverse bell curve pattern of journalistic quality. At their best, they’re highly investigative and thoughtful, at their worst, they revert to their old pre- and mis-conceptions.

The first blame for this idiot math must lie with the minister and his office. I am not paying my taxes for this kind of ineptitude.

But is it ineptitude? The Minister knows exactly what he wants: a justification for defunding the channel. He knows that no-one at the Herald is going to challenge him, because senior figures there agree with him ideologically and want his continued patronage. Thus, any figure will do. That's not ineptitude; that's contempt. It's well past time for imagining that the minister and his journalistic enablers are acting in good faith.